Troy: Yes, It Existed (But as for the Rest of Homer's Story ... )

Homer may have used poetic licence when he wrote his tale of the Trojan horse,
and the war that razed an ancient city. Rodney Chester reports

IT HAS love, betrayal, great warriors, brilliant cunning. It is the story of
the Trojan Wars and as Troy expert Dr Eric Cline, of George Washington University
in the United States says, there is a reason the story continues to fascinate
us.

"It's a combination of a chick-flick and a buddy movie," Cline says.
"There's something for everybody."

Also, after centuries of frequently bitter academic debate, it is a story that
could be true.

Archaeological evidence is pointing to the fact that Troy was, in fact, a great
city -- and not one of myth -- destroyed in a brutal battle.

Such evidence also is most timely, with a BBC documentary last month revealing
evidence uncovered by German professor Manfred Korfmann, who claims finally
to have found the city described in the famous tale.

And while historians will debate the details, movie-goers will soon get to see
the big picture played out before them in Wolfgang Petersen's much-awaited film
Troy that has Eric Bana and Brad Pitt going to war for the face who launched
a thousand ships.

Homer composed the story of the Trojan Wars in the eighth century BC, but it's
believed he was referring to events that took place about 1300BC to 1200BC.

The way Homer tells the tale, the beautiful Helen is lured away from her husband
Menelaus, the King of Sparta, by Paris, a Trojan prince. Menelaus calls on his
brother, Agamemnon, a powerful king, who launches a thousand ships to attack
Troy in a 10-year siege.

Unable to break through Troy's defences, the Greeks leave a wooden horse outside
the city gates. After the Trojans take it into the heart of the city, warriors
leap from inside the wooden and leather structure and open the gates to let
their army in. The city is then razed.

For Cline, it's a story that has fascinated him since he was seven, when his
mother gave him the book The Walls of Windy Troy.

The archaeologist, who has worked on items recovered from the Troy site, says
the appeal of the story is universal.

"It has themes that just resonate down through the ages, it doesn't matter
what age you're living in or what culture you're living in," he says.

"The hero loses the girl, the hero goes back to get the girl, the hero
eventually gets the girl with the help of his best friend who happens to be
his brother."

The book that changed Cline's life was a biography of Heinrich Schliemann, a
businessman-turned-archaeologist now considered equal parts scoundrel and scientist,
who first claimed to have discovered the city of Troy.

Schliemann made and lost several fortunes in his life and retired, after a particularly
financially healthy period as a banker during the Californian gold rush, to
find the legendary city that reputable scholars at the time doubted ever to
have existed. He started excavating in 1870 and within three years claimed he
had found the real Troy.

What he had found was some gold treasures, which he smuggled home to Germany,
a fortress, which later proved to be about 1000 years too old to be the part
of the famous Trojan war, and nine cities built one on top of another over 4000
years.

Two decades later, Schliemann's former assistant Wilhelm Dorpfeld, who took
over uncovering the site, uncovered a citadel with huge walls that had the physical
features described in the legend and could be dated to the right time.

But while Dorpfeld felt he had uncovered the real Troy, the problem was this
was a city that was not big enough to survive a decade-long siege and there
was evidence that this city, known as Troy 6, was destroyed by an earthquake,
not by a battle.

American archaeologist Carl Blegen continued digging on the site before World
War II, and he uncovered Troy 7A, which seemed to have been destroyed by humans,
but otherwise didn't match Homer's description.

For the next few decades, experts debated the facts. Some said Homer merged
two cities from different eras into the one tale.

Others said the story of the Trojan Horse related to Troy 6 with the wooden
horse a metaphor for an earthquake because Poseidon was the god of earthquakes
and the animal associated with him was the horse.

The debate took a new twist when Professor Manfred Korfmann, of Tubingen University
in Germany, began his excavations in 1988.

He says in the BBC documentary that it was the science, and not the romance
of the myth, that lured him to Troy. One of the things that puzzled him about
Troy 6 was that it had great towers but no obvious way of closing off the path
between the towers.

Korfmann's team began excavating outside the walls, which revealed clues indicating
people living in the area during the late Bronze Age, which ties in with the
time of the legendary war.

He then used magnetic imaging to study the area, and revealed a city hidden
beneath the fields that had a grid of wide streets and long avenues.

The magnetic imaging also revealed a line that turned out to be a deep ditch
that kept invaders out of the city limits.

The breakthrough revealed in the BBC documentary is evidence of large fires
and skeletons half-buried, as if they died in battle, along with arrowheads
and sling pellets stored in heaps that were prepared for a fight by defenders
who didn't have time to use them.

"It was a city which was besieged. It was a city which was defended, which
protected itself.

"They lost the war and, obviously, they were defeated," Korfmann says
in the documentary.

Cline says Korfmann's latest finds seems proof that Troy did exist, but proving
the city's existence is one thing. Proving that the rest of the story is true
is another. Cline doubts that the beauty and love of one woman is a big enough
catalyst to launch a decade of bloody conflict....